Curating Class 5: Them & [uz]

Curating Class 5: Them & [uz]

How does the art world invite, or restrict, the expression of working-class identity? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a “fugitive” from the mainstream? How might you make art outside “the system”? The final instalment of our Curating Class series is a live recording of a panel discussion featuring six of the artists exhibiting in ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]: Artists from Working-Class Backgrounds’ in The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery. Recorded in spring 2026 at the University of Leeds, curator Dr Laura Claveria chairs a panel comprising Simeon Barclay, Kedisha Coakley, Will Hughes, Sam Metz, Beth Smith and Bethany Stead. They tell us how they came to art and how class has shaped and informed their lives and work; how it’s dealt with or subverted in their art - if at all. They speak from experience about how class intersects with race, culture, queerness and neurodivergence. Co-produced by University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries and the Working-Class British Art Network. Recorded by Matthew Harrup at stage@leeds, 19 March 2026. Image: Beth Smith, Comfort Food (1990), Pastel on paper © Beth Smith. Cultural Collections and Galleries, University of Leeds Libraries, Art Collection.    Biographies Born in Huddersfield, Simeon Barclay spent his formative years during the 90s employed as a machine operative whilst being devoted to the transformative potential of clubs, music, fashion and youth culture movements across the UK. Channelling those alternative modes of expression, he would later attend night school before taking up a place at art college, graduating in 2014 with an MFA from Goldsmiths College. Barclay is the recent recipient of the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Fellowship; also received the Roberts Institute of Art, Practising Performance Commission; the Ares Art Award, and was included in the Haywood Gallery Touring exhibition: British Art Show 9. Shortly after this recording, his nomination for the 2026 Turner Prize was announced. Barclay lives and works in West Yorkshire & London. Kedisha Coakley is a British-Caribbean artist whose practice spans sculpture, printmaking, archival research, and community engagement. Her work challenges inherited interpretations of history, inviting viewers to reconsider social and cultural narratives from alternative perspectives. Rooted in reflections on selfhood, childhood memory, and personal ritual, Coakley’s practice engages cultural history and material memory to reframe African-Caribbean presence within British narratives. She examines the afterlives of colonialism through objects that carry historical and emotional weight, using materially transformative processes such as casting, imprinting, cyanotype, collagraph, and metalwork. Alongside her artistic practice, Coakley works as a Collections Assistant at The Hepworth Wakefield, where she catalogues and archives the Ronald Moody Trust gift. Will Hughes’ work deals with concepts of aspiration, queerness and glamour. They graduated from a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University in 2018 and was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Foundation Graduate Award. Following a year-long studio fellowship at spike island in Bristol, Hughes moved to the North East in 2019 to study an MFA at the BxNU [Box-New] institute. In 2021 Hughes was artist in residence at BB15 in Linz, Austria and in 2024 was artist in residence at Lightpool festival in Blackpool. Career highlights include selection for the YSI Sculpture Network 2022 and in 2023 was a Nominated Recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation. They have been selected as Tees Valley Visual Artist of the Year 2025. Born in Wakefield, Bethany Stead is based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Through drawing, painting and sculpture, Stead uses figuration and visual language which disrupts our fragile social fabric. Her work is concerned with the sense of discomfort of inhabiting bodies, forming a kind of psychological dissection. She examines themes of health, hierarchy, deviance, worship, garment and the posthuman, filtered through the lens of class and sexuality. Stead graduated from Newcastle University, 2019. She was awarded the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, selected for the Girlpower Residency, South-France, and recently had her first international solo exhibition at Cub_ism_ Artspace in Shanghai, China. Sam Metz is an artist working in between East Yorkshire and the East Midlands. They make drawing, animation and sculptural installation in response to neurodivergence and the body, often relating to stimming and ecology. They are interested in questioning sensory modality hierarchies and exploring bodily movement. Their work seeks to answer the question: what might an embodied ethics of encounter that centred neurodivergence look like? Sam was the Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize winner 2025 and a nominated recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Award 2023. Beth Smith was born in Salford. Her early memories are of so-called slum clearance - wrecking balls, acres of rubble and only churches remaining. These churches gave me her first taste of art through the plaster statues, the gilt and the Stations of the Cross. She came to study Literature and Art History at the University of Leeds and began making art. She was invited to exhibit by the British Council in Abu Dhabi and London. She showed work widely and gained several awards. Personal circumstances led to her having to stop making art for 15-20 years. However, she now an active artist again.

Curating Class 4: Samantha Manton on ‘Lives Less Ordinary: Working-class Britain Re-seen'

“This wasn’t an exhibition of ‘working-class art’, but an attempt to reframe working-class experience by utilising a gaze from within, bringing together a plurality of working-class voices”.  Samantha Manton, curator of ‘Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen' at Two Temple Place in 2025 talks about her methodologies and the decisions she made – consciously and unconsciously – in initiating and putting together the exhibition.  “I had a rolling list of the ways in which I felt working-class artists and subjects have had their nuanced experiences, perspectives and contributions misinterpreted, misrepresented and dismissed completely in the service of sustaining narrow, simplistic and derogatory views of working-class life.   “In some cases I narrated these oppressions directly, but in others it was simply about actively resisting the oppressive tendencies that artists had been subject to in the past.”   https://twotempleplace.org/exhibitions/lives-less-ordinary/ [https://twotempleplace.org/exhibitions/lives-less-ordinary/]  This content has been adapted from an illustrated talk, introduced by curator, researcher and founder of the Working Class British Art Network Beth Hughes, and recorded in front of a live audience at Curating Class: Rethinking Art Exhibitions Methodologies. This day of talks and discussions was hosted by the University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries in spring 2026 to coincide with the 2025-26 exhibition ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]: Artists from Working-Class Backgrounds’ at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery.  Co-produced by University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries and the Working Class British Art Network.  Image: A visitor to the exhibition ‘Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen' at Two Temple Place, London. Credit: Richard Eaton.   Biography  Samantha Manton is a London-based curator, researcher and cultural producer with over fifteen years of experience across the creative sector. She spent six years as part of the team developing the V&A’s two new east London sites — the V&A East Storehouse and the recently opened V&A East Museum — and curated the latter’s Why We Make collection galleries. As an independent practitioner, she recently curated Lives Less Ordinary: Working-class Britain Re-seen for Two Temple Place, an exhibition which challenged stereotypical and reductive representations of working-class lives in art and ran from January to April 2025. Drawing on her own working-class background, Samantha’s practice centres underrepresented perspectives within museums and cultural institutions. She will shortly be embarking on a 'New Narratives' research fellowship with the Paul Mellon Centre to deepen her research into class and museum collections.

Curating Class 3: Beth Hughes on Class Biases in Curatorial Practices

“The role of an organisation is not to force the artwork to adapt to the conventions of the institution, but to adapt its methods to the needs of the artwork… “Curating can itself become a class-conscious methodology.”  How do curatorial practices reproduce or challenge class-based inequalities, and what practical changes might make the art world more equitable?  Curator, researcher and founder of the Working Class British Art Network Beth Hughes discusses her experiences of institutional and curatorial class bias, and her own sense of responsibility for changing how class is represented in collections and exhibitions.  The institutional reception for works such as Jo Spence’s Beyond the Family Album (1979), or Sean Edwards’ 2020 film Maelfa exemplifies how class is so frequently “softened, displaced, washed over or under-articulated” in curatorial practices and institutions.  With reference to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – ingrained patterns of thought, behaviour and taste – Hughes identifies historic and contemporary prejudices, omissions and blind spots relating to class in art. These can range from critical tendencies to minimise the importance of class in art practices, to concerns about the conservation and care of works made with non-traditional materials, and the effect of this in turn on acquisitions.  She discusses the practices of three artists featured in our exhibition ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]’ – Conor Rogers, Charlotte Dawson and Grace Clifford – and talks about her aspirations for ‘The Way We Live’, a group exhibition that she is currently preparing for The Box, Plymouth.  Introduced by Dr Laura Claveria, University of Leeds Library Galleries Exhibitions Curator (Art), this was the third paper in Curating Class: Rethinking Art Exhibitions Methodologies. Hosted by the University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries, this day of talks and discussions coincided with the 2025-26 exhibition in The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]: Artists from Working-Class Backgrounds’.  Co-produced by University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries and the Working Class British Art Network.  http://www.bethhughescurator.com/ [http://www.bethhughescurator.com/] Image: Beth Hughes In Conversation with Joe Tucker, Manchester International Festival, 2025.

Curating Class 2: Laura Claveria and Simon Marginson on Curating and Researching [uz], [uz], [uz]

“Being faithful to the diversity of the artists involved; avoiding tropes; challenging stereotypes... Celebrating the enormous vitality and creativity of artists from working-class backgrounds...” Exhibitions Curator at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery Dr Laura Claveria gives a brief introduction to the process of curating the 2025-26 exhibition [uz], [uz], [uz]: Artists from Working-Class Backgrounds. Dr Simon Marginson discusses how he researched the University of Leeds’ Art Collection in preparation for the exhibition, and the methodology he developed for what’s thought to be the first full class audit attempted by a gallery or collection. Recorded in front of a live audience at Curating Class: Rethinking Art Exhibitions Methodologies, a day of talks and discussions hosted by the University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries in spring 2026 to coincide with the 2025-26 exhibition ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]: Artists from Working-Class Backgrounds’ at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery. Co-produced by University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries and the Working Class British Art Network. Image: Mary Lord, Sunset (detail), oil on board, 1964. Orphan work. Cultural Collections and Galleries, University of Leeds Libraries, Art Collection

Curating Class 1: Dr Rebecca Starr on Working Class Art Histories

Dr Rebecca Starr, Lecturer in History of Art in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, gives an overview of art history’s relationship with class, which she traces back to the discipline's origins in Enlightenment philosophy.    The idea of the autonomous art object, set apart from everyday life, was still being endorsed in the mid-20th-century by critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. It was challenged in the 1960s and 70s by figures including Nicos Hadjinicolaou and Griselda Pollock.  Introduced by Dr Laura Claveria, University of Leeds Library Galleries Exhibitions Curator (Art), this was the opening paper in Curating Class: Rethinking Art Exhibitions Methodologies.   Hosted by the University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries, this day of talks and discussions coincided with the 2025-26 exhibition ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]: Artists from Working-Class Backgrounds’ at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery. Watch the referenced excerpt from the Netflix documentary ‘Beckham’:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E4s0RqCBzU [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E4s0RqCBzU]  Co-produced by University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries and the Working Class British Art Network.